"I Need to Get Some Shit!"

            On Friday, September 2nd I tried to set up the computer system I’d found the night before. I had to borrow the monitor cable from my own desktop and a mouse that I had in storage, but other than the computer powering on, I couldn’t get any action on the monitor. I opened it up to see if the hard drive had been removed, but it was still there. Maybe it was thrown out because the hard drive crashed. Maybe someone who knows something about computers can fix it. I thought it would be nice to have a back-up system if mine fails. I’ll hang onto it until someone can tell me whether it’s garbage or not.

            I thought I’d at least be able to use the new looking keyboard on computer, since mine is getting dirty, but it didn’t work. I guess I’ll have to clean my old keyboard one of these days.

            As I was getting ready for my bike ride, my next-door neighbour told me that there was a letter for me downstairs. The mail person had put it in his box by mistake, so he left it for me on top of the mailboxes. I asked if it was a business letter and he said it was from the University of Toronto. I knew it was probably about my grant, so I went down and got it. It said my grant had been approved and that I’d be getting $1,980 this fall. It looks like they are going to split the full grant into first and second term and so I will probably get more in January like last year. I just hope I get enough this autumn to cover my courses. I went online and found that they’d charged me a flat fee of over $7,000 for a full set of courses again, so later on that night I had to figure out what I did last year to change that. After a little searching I found that I had to put in a formal request to be charged on a per course basis. Then I had to search for the site where I could do that. I won’t really know what my financial situation is until they show me the real amount that I owe.

            As I started out for my bike ride, I was thinking that I should have brought a long- sleeved shirt. It was almost chilly on my arms and shoulders, but it didn’t take long for me to warm up. There was surprisingly little eastbound bike traffic for a Friday.

            There was a guy on a small bike who kept passing me because he went through red lights. He was blasting jazzy rap music as if he was riding around in a convertible.

            I rode to Glebeholme and Coxwell and then across to Glebemount.

            Across from the Starbucks where I stopped to use the washroom is an empty building, on the side of which is the shadow left by the now gone sign of a Canadian Tire Express store.

            At the corner of Danforth and Pape I almost always see an African drummer busking and he almost always has beside him a toddler in a stroller. I wonder if the kid’s ears are a little to close to the drums though.

            There seemed to be a lot more teenagers on the streets and it made me wonder if school had started this week. But I found out later that it starts the day after Labour Day, so maybe they were out getting their back to school shopping done or getting their last swing of kicks in before they go back to squaresville, as the kids today say.

            At Yonge and Wellesley a late middle-aged woman had a very scraggly looking brown toy poodle on a leash. It had what looked like a dirty white stuffed version of itself in its mouth and it was growling and violently shaking it back and forth. Nearby, two other women, who looked like they were probably her friends, were standing and talking about what smelled to me like overcooked chow mein. One of them smiled and exclaimed, “It smells like there’s some really good food cooking!” The trio and their dog kind of looked like they’d just fallen off of a turnip truck.

            After the light changed, a young man, walking with a woman his age, said to her, “I want to get some shit!” They were crossing the street in the direction I was going, but way off the crosswalk and about a meter out into the road, blocking my way. As I managed to swerve out around and past them, he added, “My heart can’t handle it, but my body says yes!”

            The old evangelist that hands out the pamphlets at Yonge and Dundas only says “Believe!” as he thrusts them towards people, but he doesn’t enunciate the word very clearly. Perhaps he has a speech impediment, but he barely pronounces the first “e” or the “v”, so it almost sounds like something you’d say when you are throwing up.

            I stopped at Freshco and did a price match on a watermelon that saved me $2.00. I also bought grapes, cat food, coffee, paper towels and 3.25% milk. I had been getting by without coffee or paper towels for a long time, so it was good to finally get some. I had wanted though to only buy two rolls for $2.99 because I wanted to buy more food, but they didn’t have any two-roll packs, so I had to a larger pack of 8 that was on sale for $5.99.

            When she was ringing everything up, I asked the cute little cashier to take back the grapes because I thought that I only had $35.00 instead of $45.00. Then I said I’d take the grapes after all. She needed to get a swipe card from another cashier, but that was probably for the price match, which always holds up the line. Why don’t they just give a swipe card to every cashier? She just answered with a shrug, “Cause they don’t wanna.”